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A C64 MP3 Player
- detrites 4y agoSpoiler: it's hardware. And the opening line sounds like a challenge: > Given that the much more powerful 16-bit Amiga 500 is unable to play MP3’s,
- technothrasher 4y ago> Spoiler: it's hardware. Yeah, this isn't MP3 on a C64. It's a C64 controlling an external MP3 player.
- Tuna-Fish 4y agoI think mp3 playback requires a reasonably fast multiply instruction, and the original 68000's 70 cycles per mul @ 7MHz, or 100000 muls per second doesn't qualify.
- detrites 4y agoSome info here, claims a 68020 at 50Mhz (@10 MIPS) can just pull it off: https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=78994 https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=78994 Might mean an A500 (@1.4 MIPS) could do it if you were happy waiting 10-15 minutes for the audio of a 3 min mp3 to begin.
- Someone 4y agoI don’t think a stock A500 could do that, having 1MB RAM, max. Where would you store 3 minutes of uncompressed audio? At CD quality, that’s about 30MB.
- detrites 4y agoGiven the likely output quality you'd probably choose something like 32Kbps encoding for the mp3, which should fit 3 mins in 720KB. (Not sure how it'd affect CPU requirements?) It's not that bad-sounding: http://www.knowzy.com/Computers/Audio/Digital_Audio_Files/audio_files/Israel_Kamakawiwo%27ole-2001-Alone_In_IZ_World-10-Over_the_Rainbow-Short-32Kbps.mp3 http://www.knowzy.com/Computers/Audio/Digital_Audio_Files/au...
- Someone 4y agoBut that machine cannot decompress that at real time. The comment I replied to said that would be solvable by adding a few minutes of buffering, but that requires a buffer to hold uncompressed audio.
- Razengan 4y agoWow, how far we have come. MOD is superior to MP3 anyway :)
- pixelfarmer 4y agoI think a stock Atari Falcon is capable of playing mp3 thanks to the DSP (56001), but it still isn't a walk in the park even with that (in combination with a 68030 as the main CPU).
- lokedhs 4y agoIt took many years until MP3 decoding on a stock Falcon was possible. While the machine was generally available, there was no MP3 implementation, and the belief was that it was impossible.
- ajross 4y agoThe C64 didn't have any kind of PCM output, so it basically has to be. Early SID chips had a voltage glitch you could use for 1-bit ("speaker-style") output, and a few games used it for some effects. But you couldn't get music out of it in any real sense.
- classichasclass 4y agoFour-bit (the amplitude of the "click" caused by the SID's voltage leak is proportional to the volume, which is four-bit). There are many demos that used it for digitized music, and Rob Hubbard's Skate or Die! intro tune used it as a practical fourth voice. See also the original Covox Voice Master.
- pflanze 4y agoThere are also other techniques (found after the computer's heyday), up to 8 bits 44.1 KHz: https://www.livet.se/mahoney/c64-files/Musik_RunStop_Technical_Details_by_Pex_Mahoney_Tufvesson_v2.pdf https://www.livet.se/mahoney/c64-files/Musik_RunStop_Technic... PS. it might not really be 8 bits, but only 93 or 107 different values (6..7 bits). More details: https://csdb.dk/forums/?roomid=11&topicid=103092&showallposts=1 https://csdb.dk/forums/?roomid=11&topicid=103092&showallpost...
- mdp2021 4y ago> in any real sense I would be sure that if Tim Follin decided to just use that, he would have "made full sense" (cpr. "Agent X" and "Chronos", ZX Spectrum).
- muziq 4y agoAs fully signed up C64/SID fanboy, Chronos on the Speccy is probably my favourite piece of music in any game.. Absolute 1-bit sheer heaven..
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ruk_booze 4y agomp3 on a stock C64 was showcased by Mahoney in 2010: https://csdb.dk/release/?id=87985 https://csdb.dk/release/?id=87985 https://youtu.be/0mF9kXZAjsI https://youtu.be/0mF9kXZAjsI tbf, it is ”mp3” but still really impressive.
- ugjka 4y agosound lit bit like codec 2 on noisy rf
- xuhu 4y agoCan a 386SX play an mp3 ? Or any CPU without a FPU for that matter ?
- matja 4y agoFrom memory a 486DX4-100 or an overclocked 486DX2-66 (to 80MHz) could just about handle 128kbit MP3s
- A-Train 4y agoAh nostalgia... This was my first PC processor. I remember my CPU came with some sort of a bug that prevented me running windows 3.11 on it.
- bane 4y agoYeah, I seem to remember there was that brief time period where my PC could barely play MP3s and I used to treat them like zip archives -- rendering them back out to WAV files to play them back. I think you're right and that was around the 486 DX2, DX4, Pentium transitional time period.
- SillyUsername 4y agoInteresting. My Amiga with a 68030 @42Mhz could just about pull off mono 128Kbps decoding (as long as you didn't multitask too much). That would suggest the 486 was almost clock comparable to a 68030 at least for lossy decompression, perhaps the 486 was around ~110% had their been a 68030 series 80Mhz equivalent.
- bouncycastle 4y agoI wonder if that was also an I/O limitation rather than just a CPU thing. Old floppies probably would not handle 128kbit. Hard drives were slow too, so was memory and bus.
- vlasky 4y agoI remember I could play 128kbit MP3s in full quality using mpg123 running under Windows for Workgroups 3.11 ONLY when I overclocked my 486DX4-100 to 120Mhz.
- reaperducer 4y agoResource Limit Is Reached The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later. Apparently it's a C64 web server, too.
- hummus_bae 4y agoLimit exceeded by what? Is that really supposed to be some sort of standard response, or is it something idiosyncratic to this server?
- miohtama 4y agoNow, only if it could play music from a casette…
- nynyny7 4y agoAs other commenters have pointed out, this is a C64 controlling an MP3 player. People old enough to remember the late 1990s / early 2000s might recall that back then it was popular, too, to hook up an external MP3 decoder, e.g., to the parallel port; so that the PC's CPU would not be at 100% just for playing MP3 music.
- lokedhs 4y agoWait, was that popular? Now, I was mostly into the C64 and later Atari ST, with some insight into other platforms, but I don't think I've ever heard about an external MP3 decoder. On what's platform was this available? The closest I can think of is the external clock chip for the Atari Falcon that allowed you to decode 44.1 kHz MP2.
- ElCapitanMarkla 4y agoI do remember being about 12 and having to download music from Napster at a crap bitrate of 32kbps because our Pentium 100 struggled over that.